In the summer of 2010, China was officially recognized as the second largest economy in the world after the United States, pushing Japan to the third place. China's economy was growing at an unprecedented pace of 10% on average (as a comparison, the US average growth rate is somewhere between 2 and 3 percent). Some experts predict that if the trend continues, China will become the largest economy by the year 2020. That means that China's gross domestic product will be larger than the one of the US. So I was wondering what factors contributed to China's rapid economic rise?